Alexandrian Sphinx by Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis review – the mysterious life of Constantine Cavafy

The Guardian

4 days ago

The second floor of 10 Rue Lepsius, tucked away in the old Greek quarter of Alexandria above a brothel, was, for three decades, the literary focal point of the city. Entering the apartment, out of the Mediterranean sun, visitors would need a minute to adjust to the dimness, gradually perceiving faded curtains and heavy furniture, every surface covered with antiques and whimsical objects. There was no electricity, only candlelight. The host, proffering morsels of bread and cheese from the shadows, was an older man with 'enigmatic eyes' beneath round spectacles – the poet Constantine Cavafy.
What kind of person might be discerned amid the gloom? This is what Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis set out to discover in their deeply researched and engaging biography, the first for 50 years. They brilliantly recreate his world – two chapters about Alexandria are especially good – and investigate his place within it. Cavafy, whose admirers and champions included WH Auden, EM Forster, David Hockney and Jackie Onassis, has remained enigmatic since his death at 70 in 1933. Surprisingly, for a poet who never sold a book in his lifetime – and instead circulated broadsheets, pamphlets and sewn notebooks, building his reputation poem by poem – he now has 'a global audience he could never have imagined', thanks to poems such as The City, Waiting for the Barbarians and Ithaca, which Onassis asked to be read at her funeral.
Born in Alexandria in 1863, Constantine lost his father aged seven. His mother, Haricleia, moved the family to England, with periods in Liverpool and London. A short-lived return to Alexandria, curtailed by the British bombardment of the city in 1882, was followed by three years in Istanbul, Constantine's 'urban finishing school', where he may have had his first sexual encounters. He returned to Alexandria for good in 1885 and published his first poem the following year. To support himself, he worked for three decades as a clerk at the office of irrigation services, a dull job for a bright mind, but one which left plenty of time and energy for his livelier imaginative life.
There is no poet quite like Cavafy. His tone is terse, often ironical; his style plain, prosaic, without metaphor, simile, rhyme or rich vocabulary. He is not for everyone. Thom Gunn, writing to a friend, wondered why Cavafy had never interested him. 'Is it because the translations haven't been very good or because I feel pressures on me to like his work simply because he is homosexual?' Cavafy's best poems have a toughness and detachment that Gunn would have liked; his worst are mired in the same sentimentality that Gunn worried he was perpetuating in his own work.
Had he not become a poet, Cavafy once remarked, he would have been a historian instead. His lifelong interest in Byzantine and Hellenic history informed much of his output. He is, as Charles Simic said, 'a poet of a lost world'. A poet of lost history, too. Small episodes, forgotten figures and peripheries were his subjects. Caesarion, for example, written on the eve of the first world war, shocked Cavafy's contemporaries not only because it supposedly demonstrated his ignorance of contemporary events, but also 'focus[ed] on an erotic attraction and poetic creation, linking homoeroticism and artistic inspiration'. Bored of Athens and Sparta, Cavafy reached into the lesser known, unheroic past, in search of models.There is a certain unreality to the Cavafian canon, a dreamlike or illusory quality that one cannot help but compare to Cavafy the man, standing, as Forster put it, 'at a slight angle to the universe'. The young men in his poems, note his biographers, often 'cross the barrier between reality and imagination'.
Alexandria, too, shimmers there and threatens to dissolve. Some of his contemporaries criticised Cavafy for eschewing realist descriptions, but he understood, as Jeffreys and Jusdanis write, that 'his work's emotional energy lay in evocations, dreams, allusions and feelings'. Moments from urban life – an attractive shop assistant, the 'momentary brush' against him – lend sensual and erotic energy to his compositions. But cosmopolitan Alexandria was also a town of curtain-twitchers and keyhole-snoopers, and Cavafy – fearing social rejection and exile from the city he loved – became more discreet and conventional. 'Acknowledging homosexuality in his poetry and censoring himself in life,' the authors suggest, 'actually inspired and 'sustained' his poetry.'
The challenges for biographers are manifold: a lack of surviving letters, an 'unremarkable' daily routine, an almost complete absence of information about his romantic life (for this, the poems are our main sources). Jeffreys and Jusdanis suggest that the archive may have been tampered with to remove compromising material, both by Cavafy himself and by his executors, Alekos and Rika Sengopoulos.
For a poet whose 'captivating' voice and 'scintillating' conversation have been widely praised, his surviving letters are mostly terse and bureaucratic. Thanking Forster, a good friend and tireless supporter, for sending A Passage to India, Cavafy wrote merely: 'It is an admirable work. It is delightful reading. I like the style. I like the characters. I like the presentation of the environment.'
Such obstacles necessitate an unconventional structure, and Jeffreys and Jusdanis eschew the standard birth-to-death narrative. (To compensate for the 'hollowness' of the archive and the 'deep absence of information', Jusdanis wrote in 2018, 'a biographer of Cavafy has to work like a novelist, conjecturing and recreating scenes, filling in the gaps'.) We begin and end with Cavafy's death and are given, in between, 'a circular narrative through various thematic sequences'– discrete chapters, that is, about Cavafy's family, friends, city, poetry and his obsessive attempts to launch and secure his literary reputation.
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Despite the paucity of material, much is revealed here: Cavafy's 'gargantuan aspirations, a monastic focus on his craft, and a loveless existence'. Eventually, 'the self-interested, self-involved poet of middle age' seems to win out over 'the warm, loving, affectionate young man'. Yet he remains sphinx-like, just out of reach, and we are left sympathising with the many guests he received in his dusky, eccentric apartment, like the Greek poet Myrtiotissa, who 'felt the whole visit had an air of unreality' and, descending the stairs back into sultry, clamorous Alexandria, began to doubt whether she had seen and spoken to him at all.
Michael Nott is the author of Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life (Faber). Alexandrian Sphinx: The Hidden Life of Constantine Cavafy by Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis is published by Summit (£30). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.